Chapter 5

A DigiView Gallery

The magazine clippings below were digitized by Tim Jenison very early in 1986 using a prototype of what would soon be called the Digi-View digitizer. They represent the first color photographic reproductions possessing reasonable fidelity to their originals to appear on a consumer-grade PC. Click the thumbnails to view them at full size.

The pictures below were among the thousands of digitized images that were traded amongst Amiga users during the late 1980s, when just the novelty of displaying a photograph on a computer screen was sufficient justification. Their subject matter is typical. In addition to female models, cars, airplanes, and motorcycles, pornographic images were also a huge favorite.

NewTek Demonstrations

The two videos below show a pair of demos that NewTek created in 1987 and 1989 respectively to advertise Digi-View and its other products. Each runs in real-time on an actual Amiga; during the occasional pauses more data is being loaded from floppy disk.

Courtesy of YouTube user eseijas, the video below shows a demonstration tape which NewTek released to coincide with the launch of the Video Toaster in December 1990.

It’s great to see these demos by NewTek again, but unfortunate how badly degraded they are in quality compared to the originals. There is extreme pixelization, artifacting, and jumpiness (in the interlaced images) — which never existed in the originals (yeah, they flickered, but didn’t jump). I think I’ve seen these demos elsewhere on youtube with better quality captures. Thanks for the effort, though.